Forem: Victor Debone

How I approach long-term with Godin's buckets

Victor Debone — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 19:08:54 +0000

I started a new experiment to make my progress in long-term more visible that I call Godin's bucket (see quote below). If you want to skip the background story and go directly to the recipe, click here.

Invisible buckets

"Filling up a bucket might not be fast or easy, but you can easily measure your progress. [...] Most of what’s important to us, though, doesn’t show itself this way."
It's not a bucket - Seth Godin

But what if we could?

Me adult always wondered how me teenager could spend countless hours on games, spending for example too much time in Minecraft and almost never get bored of cutting trees or doing random things for nothing.

I tried to extract how the mechanics of keeping on for very long time worked out:

I wanted to build something/reach some place/improve some resource gathering;
In my mind I roughly gathered the list of resources I needed;
With the game tools, I started to gather the resources, one by one;
I could see the immediate progress, I had proof of my work right in front of my eyes every tree I cut, block I mined or placed somewhere;
Every time I got slightly bored, I could step back and visualise around; There was the big picture, how every action influenced the whole;
And if I the environment changed, or I needed to do something else because I had done enough of the current thing, I could easily change the task and the next time I would be passing by I would see how much work was left to be done.

Which seemed to be like something I could use outside the game, I was holding big amount of buckets, filling them all the times without ever having a clear vision of the end, and having bit of a formula for me to keep myself going on longer.

Real buckets 🚰

My first thought was to find a You Need A Budget for time. Failure.

I couldn't find anything interesting or helpful enough by searching by "Time budgeting" other than some ready-to-implement notes (if you implement this, I'm interested 😬).

By some random reason, I was at the time testing Timing 2 to understand where all my time is going, without much forethought.

But what I initially didn't pay much attention at first on Timing 2, was that it has a project/tasks feature, which I mistakenly assumed was a freelancing/hours invoicing feature. It turned out that I could use it to be the Godin's buckets.

From my addicting games habits I extracted this list and applied them to my life:

I had a blurred vision of the direction I wanted to go;
I had a plan, but incomplete, I didn't know exactly numbers, just what I needed to do;
I used a tool to execute the next obvious task at hand;
I could see the immediate progress, I had proof of my work right in front of my eyes;
Every time I stepped back, I could visualise around and see the big picture, how every execution of my task influenced the whole;
And if I needed to do something else because I had done enough of the current thing, I would move on and maybe, if the vision was still up-to-date, I would continue.

Godin's buckets

Keep a simple list of projects you want to do;
Keep a SMART list of things to-do on every of these projects. I keep mine on Todoist;
Trust yourself. You cannot move on without taking yourself seriously and professionally. You do use your tools to bring the muse, and do the work.
From the trust you can imply that immediate progress for tasks correspond directly to time spent (the game-changer for me). In whatever you will be doing in my life, you cannot cheat this only thing, you will need to spend time on it. No matter whatever other concept of progress is there for what you are doing, accept that time on the task means progress.
To step back and visualise, you need to keep track of time, otherwise you will look at void. Somehow, the act of doing task, spending the time, should be the act of keeping it registered, and this is the problem with the invisible buckets that Godin pointed out. So, instead of doing it actively, you need something that will do that for you passively, the same way that time moves on regardless if you are looking into it or not. I found that Timing 2 is great enough to keep up with this task.
And the hardest of them all, you needed to create the projects from the list of the first item, in Timing 2, and mark on it the time you are spending on them. I do it by starting to work on some project with the Timing 2 tasks, time-boxing for a pomodoro, 25 minutes. This article, for example, went to the "Writing" project/bucket. As I trust the previous items, I can later go on a week review in Timing 2 and verify what I spent time on (made progress) and what is stalled, and if I need to move on to something else or not. Everything I wrote down on the first item as the projects I want to do will be clearly shown as moving on or simply stalled. No more invisible buckets.

Next steps

First one is keeping using the basic tracking and looking into where time (progress) is going. Second thing, I still miss the "You need a budget" budgeting system, to make some actual budgeting of time. The idea is that budgeting will avoid and improve the link of time spent and progress I proposed on the 3rd item. Some projects can last forever and burn-out infinite hours, without ever bringing value, and you should spend very limited time on them so you can bring progress from clearer projects.

What can be done to excel?

Victor Debone — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 23:26:00 +0000

I spent a lot of time thinking about with how much more effort things can be done to be different and excel.

Some feedback about the dev.to editor

Victor Debone — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 21:38:45 +0000

I just typed a short blogpost and accidentally clicked on the "Write a post" button instead of "Save post", as they sit very close to each other and have very bright colours of primary actions. The sad part is that I got directed to a new blank page to start typing a new post. I lost my previous post :(

Did someone else experienced that and, because of that, moved to another editor and copied/paste here?

The blogpost was about being a pro, how I got this triggered by another mention of being a pro by Seth Godin in Tim Ferris podcast, and how I did manage to fail on my third day of becoming a pro. I mentioned the book The War of Art, I recommend it.

Obs: I almost clicked on "Write a Post" again when I wrote the last paragraph, as it stays on the fixed header when you scroll down, not the "Save post" button.

Obs2: Just reminded that dev.to is open source and somebody will say that PR are acceptable :) Thanks in advance for the note.

Obs3: Missed a last "Write a post" click. Uff...

Quick tip for typing Markdown links or images

Victor Debone — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 23:54:11 +0000

I always had problems to type the links in Markdown and I never remembered if parenthesis or the brackets should wrap the text or the link. I solved this by remembering as a function that receives a url:

[text](url)

;)

Input output

Victor Debone — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 20:35:25 +0000

For a very long I have been accumulating favourites, saving seemly relevant reddit posts and tagging books I want to read, work on, or write about, someday, somewhere. The current problem is that now this big list silently occupies some of my brain processing, frustrates me a little bit every time I remember about it and leaves me wondering if I'm really missing something it could improve me.

In hindsight, it is even funny that I even started accumulating them as I never had any plan or something in place to work with all this list, it was all about Fear of missing out.

Now, I want to make sure I can put some of it out, or potentially delete it 😬 I will try to set some system to make effective use of it all.

Triage

At first, I will go through every link and ask these simply "yes" statements/questions, I potentially avoid wasting time on deeply questioning useless links. The most important part of this step is to be brutally honest.

I cannot find this reference again in one simple search and it is not a documentation link. Eg. MDN docs
Will the topic covered in this link topic be valid next 6 months? Eg. Web components vs some very framework specific thing which I don't even use at work
Do you think it is absolutely reasonable to learn this link? I want to make sure it's not some big graduation work unrelated to what I'm currently working with now or near future
Is it challenging? Potentially I know about it, and the time to "start it" is larger than "do it"
Do you have a vision of what you will get afterwards? "It's cool" is not a valid vision

If none of them are answered "no", I can leave the link for the next step, otherwise, it is better for me to let them go.

Plan

With the list of links that passed the first triage, I need to go for a more planning attitude and answer these open ended questions.

Assuming you have this done, in your hands, what now? What do you do with that? Some exercise in the vision of this exercise. If having this link 'completed' is worthless, maybe I should let it go.
Does it take more than one hour? If yes, I need to break the link down to more tasks.

Again, empty or useless answers makes the link go away. The good answered ones are finally getting my full attention ~~someday~~,.

Execute

Now I have what to do and why, I have no excuses. I can safely put the link as actionable items in my "Sprints" and potentially manage to find time to work on some of them.

When are you going to do it? I'm trying to keep work with personal Sprints, so far they are completely failures and I'm not managing to keep them organized, but you never know ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Review

After completing the task, I want to come back and review the outcomes, to cover the gaps and check if links that are coming or not coming through are actually good enough.

What have you got back from it? If you didn't have done this, what would have changed?

Improve, all the time

This is actually the second version of this system. I started by noting down these questions on some paper, parsed a lot of my links and then did nothing with them.

It's worth nothing putting all this up, going forward one or two steps, and not maintaining the system. If I cannot maintain it, I need to change it.

In an ultimate case, I would be not save anything at all, so I don't have any burden to deal with. In the perfect case, I can handle 80% of the things I save and learn something worth and new.

Self-improving system

Victor Debone — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 22:43:21 +0000

If you want to improve something, do you start by improving the meta. You may be fixing the wrong problem by attacking problems on the surface.

this.me()

Victor Debone — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 16:05:58 +0000

Wololo ${}